Senator Harkin and the Scientific Method

Thanks to Dr. Lipson, I didn’t have to listen to the Senate Panel video to find out that Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) made this statement of disappointment regarding his own creation, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):

One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. It think quite frankly that in this center and in the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving. (from last week’s hearings, time marker approx. 17:20)

Are scientists at the NIH really too afraid of Harkin to explain to him how science works? Apparently so. Otherwise Harkin might learn that his statement is more wrong-headed than it would be for one of us to complain that the Supreme Court ought to assume that a defendant is guilty until proven innocent, rather than the other way around. In scientific inquiry, for those who don’t know, good experimental design is always directed at disproving a hypothesis, even one that pleases its investigator. The rest of Harkin’s sentiment—“seeking out and approving”—is incoherent.

The Selling of ‘Integrative Medicine': Snyderman Trumps Weil

Spin doctors shilling for ‘integrative medicine,’ which the NCCAM defines as “combining treatments from conventional medicine and CAM,” appear to have now decided that subtler language is more likely to sell the product. We’ve previously seen an example offered by ‘integrative’ Mad Man Andrew Weil:

Last week the Times of London revealed inside information from the General Medical Council (UK, responsible for physician licensing) of an ongoing investigation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and from its own investigation. This revelation recalled other instances of fakery from reports of sectarian medicine (“CAM”) successes. The Medical Council information contained evidence that the data from the now famous Wakefield cases used to claim an association of the MMR vaccine with childhood autism and inflammatory bowel disease were misinterpreted, altered, and to some extent, faked. The report and history were reviewed by David Gorski last week. In eight of twelve cases, the dates of autism onset were “rearranged” to fit the needed time association, and many small bowel biopsies were “reinterpreted” to show inflammation.

The Wakefield claims were long suspected by reputable medical scientists and skeptics as being erroneous or fraudulent. Note: the Council hearings are still in progress, and the Times report is subject to legal complaint. The original details can also be seen in the Times articles.

This expose’ adds to a growing list of reports with erroneous and faked information in medical journals used either for economic reward, undeserved fame, or to promote ideological claims for medical sects and cults. Although history of erroneous or false claims goes back hundreds of years, the altering or synthesizing of data passing the recently conceived peer review system is new, illuminating defects in the journal peer review and editing system.

If journals were invented in the 18th century, and operated like journals of today, Mesmer’s demonstrations might have been published, and the Ben Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier and French Academy’s disproof might have been rejected. (Laughter here.) But journals continue to make major goofs in publishing implausible results despite the popularity of a famous specialty journal for that purpose.

Examples vary from acceptance of language manipulation – “alternative,” “healing,” “integrative,” etc., to the fakery of recent papers showing effects of prayer. The two famous studies of prayer in the cardiac care unit ranged from the unadmitted breaking of the blind in the Bird study (So Med J 1988; 81:826-826) to unadmitted imbalances of subject and control groups (Harris, Arch Int Med 1999;159:2273-2278.) And from those to the likely fakery of the distant prayer study of in vitro fertilization (Cha, Wirth, Lobo; J Reprod Med 2001:46;781-786) in which three separate prayer groups on two continents improved pregnancy rates in a group of women on a third continent by an implausible 100 percent. In all of these cases, the papers passed peer or editorial review despite the methodological defects that were picked up by us skeptics (K. Atwood, K.Courcey [an RN] B. Flamm, and others.)

Adding insult to the above, Annals of Internal Medicine published a systematic review of intercessory prayer (Astin et al, Ann Int Med, 2000;132: 903-910) containing not only the Bird and Harris studies counted as positive, but also the Targ study on brain tumors, found by reporter Po Bronson to have had its end point altered by the authors when the primary one showed no effect.(more…)

The US Senate, which is furiously debating the details of the economic stimulus package making its way through Congress, passed an amendment yesterday (Feb. 3) to add $6.5 billion in National Institutes of Health funding on top of the $3.5 billion already allotted to the agency in the bill…

Exactly how an NIH funding increase will be spent remains to be determined.

You can bet that if this happens, the NCCAM will be licking its chops for some of that lettuce. Let’s continue to explore why it shouldn’t get any…

There is a recent trend in UK Universities to close programs offering science degrees for various forms of so-called alternative medicine (CAM), such as homeopathy, crystal healing, and traditional Chinese medicine. This occurs amid growing scientific criticism of these programs.

This is a very good thing, and something I would like to see replicated in the US. The scientific community is appropriately concerned about such programs for a number of reasons. We have also been highly critical of them here at SBM – for example take a look as Wallace Sampson’s excellent analysis of academic medicine here and here, and David Gorski’s summary of Medical Academic Woo here.

Academic institutions have an implied contract with society – they are given resources (donations, scholarships), power (the ability to grant recognized degrees), and respect (the institutions and their members are often given the assumption of credibility and knowledge), and in exchange they agree to follow a code of professional ethics. This contract is similar to many professions, like physicians or lawyers.

Worse, aiding and abetting this infiltration is the federal government itself in the form of NCCAM. As I discussed in my usual excruciating detail in my original post and as Steve Novella, Kimball Atwood, and I have subsequently discussed many times on this very blog, particularly recently (so much so that I’m thinking of giving NCCAM its very own category here on SBM), NCCAM not only funds studies of dubious “alternative” therapies, such as reiki and homeopathy, that estimates of prior probability alone would argue to be so close to impossible as to be not worth spending millions, much less thousands, of dollars upon, but it also promotes quackery by funding “fellowships” at various institutions to teach “complementary and alterantive medicine” (CAM) sometimes also called “integrative medicine” (IM). Given that it spends over $120 million a year on mostly dubious studies and CAM promotion, we all have called for NCCAM to be defunded and disbanded.

Nearly a year has passed since I wrote those two posts. Ironically enough, at the time I wrote my first post about NCCAM for this blog, I pointed out that at first I had disagreed with my co-blogger Wally Sampson and his call to “defund” the NCCAM in an article published on Quackwatch nearly five years ago. My original reason was that I thought that there was value in studying these therapies to find out once and for all whether these therapies do anything greater than placebo or not. I now admit that I was very naive, and this was how I admitted it:

Two developments over the last several years have led me to sour on NCCAM and move towards an opinion more like Dr. Sampson’s. First, after its doubling from FY 1998-2003, the NIH budget stopped growing. In fact, adjusting for inflation, the NIH budget is now contracting. NCCAM’s yearly budget remains in the range of $121 million a year, for well over $1 billion spent since its inception as the Office of Alternative Medicine in 1993. Its yearly budget contains enough money to fund around 75 to 100 new five year R01 grants, give or take. In tight budgetary times my view is that it is a grossly irresponsible use of taxpayer money not to prioritize funding for projects that have hypotheses behind them that have a reasonable chance of being true. Scarce NIH funds should not be for projects that have as their basis hypotheses that are outlandishly implausible from a scientific standpoint. Second, I’ve seen over the last few years how NCCAM is not only funding research (most of which is of the sort that wouldn’t stand a chance in a study section from other Institutes or Centers)) but it’s funding training programs. Indeed, that was the core complaint against NCCAM: that it facilitates and promotes the infiltration of nonscience- and nonevidence-based treatments falling under the rubric of so-called “complementary and alternative” or “integrative” medicine into academic medicine.

Nothing has changed since I wrote those words–except for one thing. We now have a new President who stated in his inaugural address:

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

As Kimball Atwood put it, Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! The big and as yet unasked (and unanswered) question is: How? Neither defunding nor dismantling NCCAM will be easy, and we have to think about how to preserve the functions of NCCAM that might be worth saving.(more…)

…and in so doing, President Obama, you and we would abolish the NIH’s second most prodigious squanderer of precious research funds! Surprise: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) spends slightly more on humbug than does the Center created for that purpose. All told, the NIH squanders almost 1/3 of a billion dollars per year promoting pseudoscience.

I’ve decided to add my two cents to the recent groundswell of demand to stop this sordid and embarrassing chapter in NIH history—even more sordid and embarrassing, in its way, than NIH researchers being on the take: pseudoscience is exactly antithetical to the mission of the NIH, which sponsors it repeatedly, officially, overtly, unethically, and dangerously. At least, in the case of Big Pharma greasing the palms of NIH researchers, those involved generally prefer to obscure the transactions, as good sense and traditional mores dictate.

My comments will be somewhat different from others’, not because I disagree with theirs but because it’s worthwhile to stress points that have not been stressed or even mentioned. I won’t bother to justify the assertion that “promoting pseudoscience” is an accurate description of what the NCCAM and the OCCAM do, because I’ve done that several times in the past, beginning here and here, and more recently here. I will plagiarize myself a bit, but only to introduce certain points.

In their response to Salerno’s article they accused him of being unqualified to object to “CAM” because he was only a reporter. Fact was that most of his points were from my writings, which Slerno frankly acknowledged. The several rebutting authors never mentioned my name. Of course not. (That it was lost in the SBM analyses is understandable.)

And that is the frank dishonesty we are dealing with when we face off with these characters, who now have the ears and eyes of the Institute of Medicine, academic deans and professors, and government. They are smiling as they read this.(more…)

The following book review was written not by your poster (although I’ve added the hyperlinks), but by his friend Cees Renckens, who is a gynecologist in the Netherlands and the chairman of the Dutch Society against Quackery. A short bio of Dr. Renckens, including references to several articles in English, follows the review. Most impressive to me is that he is, as far as I know, the first and only person in the world to have earned a PhD in a field that describes much of the content here at Science-Based Medicine: the rational evaluation of anomalous and implausible medical practices.

For several years, Dr. Renckens and the Dutch Society have been embroiled in a disturbing legal case involving freedom of speech. This was previously mentioned on SBM by astute reader Dr. Peter Moran. According to Dr. Renckens, the Dutch Supreme Court will issue its final judgment of the case at the end of February.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Moerman anti-cancer diet was very popular in the Netherlands. Moerman was a family physician with no training in oncology or nutrition. He kept carrier pigeons and believed that his birds never got cancer. Therefore he developed a diet based on food for carrier pigeons. He had no contact with oncologists, nutritionists or other physicians. The Inspector for Public Health for his area was of the opinion that Moerman had “serious medical-ethic defects.”

Add to this example the fact that “alternative” physicians appear to be successful in presenting their approach as highly ethical, with its respect for old wisdom, for the ideas and peculiarities of their patients, and for treatments borrowed from Ayurvedic, Chinese, Tibetan and other third world medical systems, all of which can be classified as backwards, and you can understand why my interest was immediately aroused when I learned that a book had been issued with the title Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Ethics, the Patient and the Physician.

Finally, I thought, a look through ethical glasses at the deceit, at the admissibility of shoddy scientific research of “alternative” treatments, and perhaps a discussion of the necessary rigor of academic medicine and about how to deal with those who reject such rigor. When, in a short review in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the book was judged to be “excellent,” I dispelled my dislike of the rather high price and ordered it.

The quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that it does not deserve the rubric of “alternative,” that it is in fact mainstream. Indeed, that is the very reason why “alternative” medicine morphed into CAM in order to soften the “alternative” label. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical practices appear no longer to like CAM as term for their dubious practicies, because it still uses the word “alternative.” That is, of course, because they recognize that labeling something as “alternative” in relationship to scientific medicine automatically implies inferiority, and CAM advocates are nothing if not full of hubris. Such a term conflicts with their desire to “go mainstream,” and they most definitely do want to go mainstream, but they want to do it on their own terms, without all that pesky mucking about with science, evidence, and rigorous clinical trials. Consequently, they increasingly use a new term, a shiny term, a term free of that pesky “alternative” label. Now they want to “integrate” their unscientific placebo-based practice with real, scientific medicine. Thus was born the term “integrative” medicine (IM, an abbreviation that is the same as that for internal medicine, an identity that I don’t consider coincidence).

One of the biggest complaints we at SBM (or at least I at SBM) have about the attitude of practitioners of scientific medicine towards CAM/IM is that most of them do not see it as a major problem. Dr. Jones characterized this attitude as the “shruggie” attitude, and it’s a perfect term. Equally perfect is her analogy as to why “integrating” pseudoscience with medical science is not a good idea. I myself have lamented the infiltration of pseudoscience and outright quackery into medical academia and the role that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has played in promoting that infiltration. In addition, wealthy patrons of CAM/IM such as Donna Karan and the Bravewell Collaborative have been generous spreading their money around. In this increasingly cash-strapped health care environment, hospitals know on which side their bread is buttered and see the “integration” of woo into their service portfolio as a means of beefing up the bottom line with cash on the barrelhead transactions that require no mucking about with nasty insurance forms. In fact, services such as reiki, homeopathy, acupuncture, and others often require no forms other than credit card receipts for the patient to sign.(more…)

However, more often, it’s none of these things. As much as they infuriate me, I believe that most reporters in the media do really want to get it right. However, they are hobbled by three things. First, many, if not most, of them have little training in science or the scientific method and are not particularly valued by their employers. For example, witness how CNN shut down their science division. Second, the only medical or science stories that seem to be valued are one of three types. The first type is the new breakthrough, the cool new discovery that might result in a new treatment or cure. Of course, this type doesn’t distinguish between science-based and non-science-based “breakthroughs.” They are both treated equally, which is why “alternative medicine” stories are so popular. The second type is the human interest story, which is inherently interesting to readers, listeners, or viewers because, well, it’s full of human interest. This sort of story involves the child fighting against long odds to get a needed transplant, for example, especially if the insurance company is refusing to pay for it. The third type, unfortunately, often coopts the second type and, to a lesser extent, the first type. I’m referring to the “medical controversy” story. Unfortunately, the “controversy” is usually more of a manufactroversy. In other words, it’s a fake controversy. No scientific controversy exists, but ideologues desperately try to make it appear as though a real scientific controversy exists. Non-medical examples include creationism versus evolution and the “9/11 Truth” movement versus history. Medical examples include the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” movement versus science-based medicine and, of course, the anti-vaccine movement.

But the thing that most prevents the scientifically accurate evaluation by the media of unscientific health claims has to be the “tell both sides” culture of “balance” demanded by journalists. Telling both sides is, of course, very important when one side is not obviously correct compared to the other. Examples of such a situation include virtually any political controversy, where there almost always are two (and usually more) sides to an issue. In contrast, in science and medicine, there are not always two sides to an issue. (Again, think of creationism versus evolution.) In science and medicine, there is often a side supported so overwhelmingly by evidence, experimentation, and observation that the “other side” does not warrant being told, as it has already been considered and rejected by science. An excellent example of this is homeopathy. Another excellent example of this is the antivaccine movement, and, unfortunately, a prime example of “telling both sides” of the “vaccine debate” reared its ugly head a couple of weeks ago. Worse, it reared its ugly head on a show that ostensibly claims to be medically accurate, so much so that it features four doctors as its hosts.

I’m referring to a TV show called The Doctors. If the episode segment I’m about to discuss, which aired on December 11, is any indication, these are Doctors that anyone seeking scientifically sound information about medicine should run, not walk, away from.(more…)